I apologize if there is an easy solution to this problem but I have searched this forum to no avail. I am trying to optimize our new Discourse forum for SEO, and it seems that multiple pages containing duplicate content can be accessed at different URLs, thus hurting search engine ranking by “splitting” the traffic for each duplicated page. So imagine we have some content at: forum.foo.com/c/uncategorized The issue is that this same exact page can also be accessed at: forum.foo.com/c/uncategorized/l/latest?category_id=1&page=1 This means we need to add a canonical redirect from the second URL to the first by putting the tag ’ link rel=“canonical” href=“http://forum.foo.com/c/uncategorized” ’ in the page header when ever the URL “forum.foo.com/c/uncategorized/l/latest?category_id=1&page=1” gets loaded. Is there any built-in support to do this in Discourse? This issue seems to really be hurting our search engine rankings as just about every category page has duplicate URLs at something like */l/latest?category_id=1&page=1. I do not mind doing some minor tinkering in the ruby-rails backend to get this done, but we would prefer not to dive into any complex hacks.

An example of 2 URLs with duplicate content are: http://forum.learntomod.com/c/uncategorized/l/latest?category_id=1&page=1 and http://forum.learntomod.com/c/uncategorized

Thankyou so much! Glad to hear an update is in the works.

Implemented via https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/3235#issuecomment-75987533

Confirmed it looks good, in https://meta.discourse.org/c/support/l/latest I see

I have seen that the platform have a few seo navigation and crawl issues. Here are the problems Point 1. You’ve implemented rel=‘next’/‘prev’ but not as a meta tag but as a item prop. You’ve put in canonical only in Topics but not properly in Categories. https://meta.discourse.org/c/feature & https://meta.discourse.org/c/feature/l/latest?page=1 both have the same canonical whereas it should be different for both the pages. Point 2. NOSCRIPT URL : Plugin for signatures? & Plugin for signatures? PushState URL: Plugin for signatures? & Plugin for signatures? - #2 by cpradio Point 3. Refer point 1 answer

Everything is implemented correctly per Google Webmaster guides. This was already covered in previous topics. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en Please cite specific words and sentences that are not being correctly met there, on that page. Searchers commonly prefer to view a whole article or category on a single page. Therefore, if we think this is what the searcher is looking for, we try to show the View All page in search results. You can also add a rel=“canonical” link to the component pages to tell Google that the View All version is the version you want to appear in search results. See above. “VIEW ALL”. That would be the category root page…

Jeff, What you say is right, but the problem is that there is no “VIEW ALL” page in discourse forums. I am citing examples of even this forum. Let us take Feature category, the URI is https://meta.discourse.org/c/feature and if you look at it through user-agent as Googlebot/Bingbot/Slurp! you can see the page is broken into pagination https://meta.discourse.org/c/feature/l/latest?page=1 then page=2 and so on upto page=72 containing 30 links each but all of these pages have the same canonical: so you are leaving out all the other 71 pages from being indexed. You can even check out the Google Cache if you don’t believe me at Google Search or site: command Google Search But the same does not hold true for Topics pages where the canonical changes for each page. And this is the correct way to do this. And if you are at it, can we keep the same pagination style in both NOSCRIPT as well as PushState(). Sorry to keep disturbing if you are finding this annoying.

Okay, so here’s the problem: Category pages have incorrect canonical: the page parameter is not included.

What you’re saying is that there is no canonical possible in this case. The better solution, if that’s true, is to not render it at all. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html Mistake 1: rel=canonical to the first page of a paginated series Imagine that you have an article that spans several pages: example.com/article?story=cupcake-news&page=1 example.com/article?story=cupcake-news&page=2 and so on Specifying a rel=canonical from page 2 (or any later page) to page 1 is not correct use of rel=canonical, as these are not duplicate pages. Using rel=canonical in this instance would result in the content on pages 2 and beyond not being indexed at all. So your advice was incorrect. The correct thing to do, per Google webmaster guidelines, is not to render canonical at all on paginated content. @techapj can you make sure that’s the case in every common scenario? It is definitely the case on /latest (homepage).

Adding Canonical Redirects for SEO Optimization

Product Support

eviltrout (Robin Ward) September 29, 2015, 9:24pm 21

Follow a discussion with Sam on this I’ve reverted this commit so we can rethink and do it properly.

Topic		Replies	Views
Google indexing same page multiple times: Issue with canonicals Product Support	7	1729	October 18, 2019
Removing the /2, /3, /4, etc links for each reply within a topic URL Development seo	33	4761	October 13, 2024
?page= sometimes redirects to a page with a different canonical URL Bug	2	806	October 19, 2020
Negative SEO because of too much category pages getting indexed Product Support	8	1856	July 3, 2017
Search engines now blocked from indexing non-canonical pages Announcements seo	23	4885	March 15, 2022

Adding Canonical Redirects for SEO Optimization

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